


When Wind Is in the Deadly East

by Vulgarweed



Series: Eyrie Tales [3]
Category: Sherlock (TV), TOLKIEN J. R. R. - Works & Related Fandoms, The Lord of the Rings - J. R. R. Tolkien
Genre: All-Eagle AU, Crossovers & Fandom Fusions, Fandom Fusion, Holmes Family, Holmes Siblings in Middle-earth and they are all Giant Eagles, Other, The Final Problem Except They're All Giant Eagles, Undertones of Incest, overtones of incest
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-28
Updated: 2017-06-28
Packaged: 2018-11-20 02:07:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,754
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11326422
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Vulgarweed/pseuds/Vulgarweed
Summary: “Brother mine, the dark clouds gathering have long stalked you, from the days of our home eyrie, and at last I shall tell you the full tale of our lost sister.”“It was news to me that we had one. It would have gone less ill for us had I learned of this sooner.”“You remember nothing, then. I thought as much. I shall tell you the full tale of Eurys our sister, burned through and corrupted by the East Wind where long she soared in circles, with the flames of madness in her eyes and the soot of Mordor in her feathers. The lost nestmate long imprisoned since our first eyrie burned. You were barely more than hatchlings, you and she, when first she tried to slay you. ”***The third and final Eagle-centric Tolkien story for my Fandom Trumps Hate bidderlydiabennet (Teasel). I so enjoyed our email exchange with your ideas - you inspired me to write a story that never would have existed otherwise.Massive thanks to my betasTyellasandiwantthatcoat!





	When Wind Is in the Deadly East

**Author's Note:**

  * For [teasel (lydiabennet)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/lydiabennet/gifts).



_In the times of the last gathering darkness, when great fires burned again in Mordor and the Lord of the Tower called all evil things to him, many were those who answered the call. Men came to him, and Orcs, and all manner of foul creatures beyond description - as well as some who were unexpected. Even, rumour had it, some of those long thought incorruptible, like the giant Eagles who served as the eyes of Manwë._

_Rumours grew that Orcs multiplied in numbers not seen since the time of the Dark Lord’s even greater master, and that his most fearful servants, the bearers of the Nine Rings, once again went abroad - sometimes upon black horses stolen from Rohan, sometimes upon immense beasts with vast wings, surveying the trembling lands beneath from the air._

_Great was the fear and mistrust in those days, even among kindreds that had long held each other in some esteem and mutual advantage. Even many of the mighty and wise regarded each other with hints of creeping doubt._

_Long had the great eagles listened to the counsel of the Ainur upon Middle-earth, and closest in their councils were the Istari known to them as Mithrandir and Aiwendil - and those two spoke of betrayals, and of unrest growing within the heart of the land. Even the realms and servants of Yavanna were not immune to the Enemy’s call._

_So it was that one of the Eagles, high in the close circles of the Wind-lord himself and held to be especially keen of mind, took counsel with his own younger brother, and told him at last the truth of a shadow and a threat in the heart of their own clan._

 

“Our kind have keen eyes, and broad are our wings, and long our memories. Every great Eagle has known, we are Maiar of Manwë, he who rules the winds from the holy mountain of Taniquetil far across the Sundering Seas. Long have our people kept watch over the Children of Ilúvatar in the marred lands here, long did we keep watch on the Meneltarma in doomed Númenor, ever warning of devices of the Enemy, and even at need, being the rescue service of last resort. Or so we were promised, yet it seems we are of rather frequent resort. Be that as it may, though it saddens me to say it, Valinor is far away, and there are winds in these lands that have not been under the control of Manwë for many an Age.”

“As usual, you say nothing I do not already know,” said the younger Eagle, pecking at his mountain goat peevishly. “What relevance has this to me now, when I seek knowledge you have long withheld from me?”

“Brother mine, the dark clouds gathering have long stalked you, from the days of our home eyrie, and at last I shall tell you the full tale of our lost sister.”

“It was news to me that we had one. It would have gone less ill for us had I learned of this sooner.”

“You remember nothing, then. I thought as much. I shall tell you the full tale of Eurys our sister, burned through and corrupted by the East Wind where long she soared in circles, with the flames of madness in her eyes and the soot of Mordor in her feathers. The lost nestmate long imprisoned since our first eyrie burned. You were barely more than hatchlings, you and she, when first she tried to slay you. ”

“Imprisoned she is no longer, for she it was who wounded my friend the raven after winning his trust. She it was who lured me for a day of flight and eating fish by the river, for she wore mild disguise and in my enchanted dream I deemed she was in lonesome despair, and I took pity on her sorrow. She might have tried to have me in a mating flight were we in season, _brother mine.”_

“That would have been disastrously awkward. Grievous news it is that she has been freed, for it hastens the confrontation I have long dreaded. To her prison we must go then, to see to her security.”

“Is that not the last place she is likely to be found?”

“You always were the slowest of us, little brother. Do you not feel the call of the nest to our kind? My error was to imagine her a thrall in her constrained domain, but now I see she has become its ruler. This I should have foreseen, for there has never been a mind such as hers borne on two wings in our current Age.”

“Are we not all reckoned among the mighty?” His tone was wry, perhaps even mocking. “Do we not all descend from the mighty Thorondor, and do we not all at times have the potential to reach his heights? So we are told from the eggshell. I have met many eagles who lower the intelligence of the entire cliff-roost, however.”

“We all thought you were slow, little brother. Until we met other birds. That was a mistake.”

“Hardly so, for it seems my own clutch-mates are my cruelest enemies. And yet now from what you tell me, I deem you have spent much time in possibly ill-advised great efforts to protect me.”

The elder chuckled. “Eagles are not kindly birds.”

“No, we are not. Many of us are cowardly and cruel, and fights to the death in the nest are hardly uncommon. Yet you returned from your lofty heights, you kept watch, and now I suspect that you intervened. For what reason? Are you stooping to…mammalian sentiment?”

The elder wore a contemptuous expression at this - though, to be fair, eagles nearly always look like that. “Perhaps it pleased me to take an active role in our kind’s fate, for once,” he said. “Though you know I am no fan of wingwork.”

“You do not fool me,” said the younger. “I know that you are so deep in the counsels of the wise, you nearly are the council. And so you use the machinations of the Wise to bring to bear upon our own family. I see your heart, concealed though it is beneath your crop full of overfat sheep. I will speak of it no longer now, as you wish. But now the time is come. I hear the voices too, brother dear, and mine eyes are as keen as yours. I have had it from the smaller birds, the hawks and the crebain of Fangorn and Dunland, the thrushes and ravens of the Lonely Mountain and Dale, the terror that simmers in the East prepares to go forth. How long did you think to contain the wind herself? Did you bind her beneath the roots of the mountain like Durin’s Bane? Was she chained in the void like the mighty one whose name is no longer spoken - for even the Valar still fear him? What is to be done with one fallen into shadow . . . And still, dare I say it, beloved?”

“Our kin do not _fall_ into shadow, little brother. We do not fall until we die, and long are the lives that weave our tailwinds. Rarely do we _soar_ into darkness, but when we do it is with eyes open and talons grasping. Our sister is an Eagle still, but to speak with her at all is to risk corruption, for in her presence we are reminded that the one Unnamed was the mightiest of all, and in all the aspects of creation did he have a part, including even the living breath of Manwë. You and I are clever, brother mine, and I will allow that even you have no small gift of sight. But she surpasses us in cunning as Arien surpasses Tilion in blinding fire and searing heat. Beware. Be not beguiled.”

“Beguiled I have been, when she appeared to me in beggar’s guise to learn my nature by feigning to seek my aid. Where were you when she presented to me a lonesome heart and an injured wing? If to slay me was her wish still, she could have tried again to take me off my guard, and I would not have been at my peak of powers to beat her back. No, brother, she plays a longer game, and I would see it through.”

“And what is to be gained by seeking her now? You would put yourself and all our kin into fathomless danger, for one who has gone beyond us now and cannot be reached.”

“Did you not once tell me that knowledge is the source of our power and our reason for being? You cannot be certain that there is no hope.”

“Hope is a fool’s game.”

The younger eagle huffed and made a show of grooming his neck feathers. “Then what is our purpose to the Ainur then? You are higher in their counsels then you let on, are you not, brother mine? You are always so conveniently placed at just the right moment - and always so keen to recruit me to your side. Rarely to my advantage, these little missions of ours - long and tedious work it was to cleanse my feathers of the essence of frightened Dwarf. Where was the challenge in that?”

“You had not been taking care of yourself. Desperate indeed you must have been - do not think for one moment I did not see you actually eat that Warg.”

“Needs must, elder brother,” sighed the younger, shrugging his golden-feathered shoulders. “It was repellent. But I feared you might have been closer to indulging in more tender prey. Even you could not talk yourself out of trouble had you devoured one of Olórin’s companions.”

“We are predatory, little brother. But not indiscriminate.”

***

Higher and higher did he soar, towards the smoky savage peaks of the Ered Lithui and the Ephel Duath and the terrible corner where they meet, the Towers of the Teeth looming far in the distance above the blasted plains. Here the air was beginning to be unwholesome, pierced with the tang of noxious gasses and the smokes of great and sinister fires. Swamp gas and the smell of ancient death had seemed to pursue him from the Dead Marshes. Close was he now to places even his kin would rarely go except in times of great need - for as they were the eyes of the Ainur in the rest of the land, from a great tower not so far away was another Eye that watched and did not rest.

Still, a mountain wind is a mountain wind, and the thermals lifted him as they always did as he held his great wings firm and arched, slightly angled to catch the best and sharpest lift.

He thought it an odd place to keep a prisoner, so close to those who might find her useful should she curry their favor - or they, hers. Little had he trusted instinct and premonition in his youth, preferring to trust instead to his eyes and his reason, which he had imagined would deceive him not. Yet over long years he had learned that when his feathers prickled and his talons twitched in uncertain, invisible graspings even while tucked against his body in flight, there was perhaps something he was missing, something even his bright eyes and claw-sharp mind had not fully worked through to reach true understanding.

The skin that held his feathers quivered, and he turned the long fingers of his primaries at the tip of his vast wings upward, reaching for the wind. Instinct told him to keep a safe distance from the cliff face with its open, black holes of caves and its needle-bitter rock formations. If she was as great and clever as his brother claimed, how could stone and iron hold her? The wind whipped through the ancient spires of rock and made an eerie wailing song, thumping against the mountainsides like the beating of enormous wings.

And between the spires of stone, in a vast cage that seemed hewn from the very bones of the world, he saw her.

Dark she was, her feathers stained black but for patches where the natural bronze of her true colors shone through, and deep and piercing was the veined and bottomless golden red of her eyes, burning like liquid stone from the heart of Orodruin.

Her wings beat and fluttered as she rose from the bottom of her aerial prison. She was much larger than her brothers, as is the way with eagles, and her talons deadly sharp as her great feet clenched and unclenched.

(She had nearly torn apart her own wings when they were barely finished growing, elder brother had told him. She explained that she only wished to see how they worked. ‘Such is the logic of Arda Marred, little brother. She who breaks a thing to understand it has left the path of wisdom.’

“You told me she was brilliant.”

“That she was and is, but I never said she was wise.”)

She let out one sharp cry at the sight of him, a high piercing shriek that echoed from the dark stone canyons. Her face was at first twisted with rage, and then did it seem to soften, and she more resembled the shy and injured bird - or so he thought - who had once seemed to seek his aid. The feathers of his neck shivered and started to stand on end as he recalled how easily he had accepted her guise. Warily now he watched her, studied the calculation and the madness in her eyes.

A fool he had been. A fool he was now, compared to her. A fool is anyone who imagines her subject to her prison and unable to leave it at her own will, as clearly she must be, returning to her own stone-bound and iron-barred nest out of choice. For what is the wide world to one who holds a perfect replica of everything in her mind - dissected, recombined, viewable from every angle? What need had she of leaving?

And yet he still did not accept that she had fully flown into shadow never to return, for she was still an Eagle born for clear light and clean winds. To give up the full freedom of wind and cloud was to give up her hatch-right. Little patience had he for the discussions of the elders of matters of hroa and fëa, and whether Eaglekind were truly of the clan of the Ainur. He had long held that they were more like to the Tree-shepherds, sapient children of Yavanna, than to the pompous Istari or renegades like Gorthaur the Bauglir-thrall. Yet the mightiness of Thorondor gave him pause in this conviction - as did the full fell consciousness of his own sister, appreciated at least in her full regal terror.

She seemed calm as she perched and folded her vast wings, studying him. Every feather of him she memorized in her sight. She was beautiful, and terrible was she in her cold madness. _Beautiful. Might kill me in the end. Still beautiful._

Now did his brother’s words of warning echo through his mind, and drifted away as he struggled to recall them in the burning light of her gaze. _Her words will not only sting, but they can overtake your mind, brother mine. She will seem wise, and you the fool who must hang on her every word - oh, you are a fool, but not so much of one as she will have you believe. She has brought ruin upon whole pairs and clutches with only her words. Like all the fairest servants of the Enemy, she speaks with silver tongue to snare the mind. Beware, little one. In her presence you will feel like a mere fledgling again - and against her, you are. She need not leave her cage to destroy you._

 _Breathe,_ he told himself. _Propel clean air into one’s lungs, feel its cool freshness in blood, in hollow bones._

He looked into her eyes. She was his sister, there was no mistaking the likeness of family in her now. It chilled him how well she had disguised it before - she had seen right through him, and he had not seen her at all. She had an advantage. She could take it again, what would stop her?

He lowered his shoulders and folded his wings in a gesture of non-threatening. He came forward slowly on his great, scaled-yellow feet, talons unclenched and scrabbling lightly against the stone.

She ruffled her enormous wings when he came too close, though he thought that steel and stone still held them apart. She gave one low whistle that seemed to rise from her chest through her deadly beak and into the sky, a sound of challenge and of curiosity and, he caught himself imagining, of sorrow.

But he did not expect her to truly feel that.

Eagles are not songbirds. Even those of the Great Eagles who have speech like the Ainur and like Ilúvatar’s Children, do not have lovely voices when they speak the chirping and keening and sharp whistles of their bird-kind. Even the greatest of them must use their thought and words of reason to persuade, not their harsh tones.

Yet the East Wind sang sharp and bitter in the spires and pinnacles of his sister’s lonely prison. Her voice keened to itself, speaking dread words among the harsh blasts of cold, tinged with the hint of choking ash. He could feel his mind beginning to bend to hers, for in this desolate place she alone seemed to promise engagement, a problem, a contact, a blessing of thought, a relief of solving. Her voice was unwholesome to hear and the air was not pleasant to breathe and the gathering dark clouds in the east, over Mordor, seemed to shut off the sky and fill him with panic: as though he too was now imprisoned and could not soar above their low ceiling.

He ruffled his wings to reassure himself, careful to keep their stretch out of intimidation-display range. That would only annoy her, or possibly amuse her to a dangerous degree.

Quickly through his mind-aerie did he fly in his thought, and long had he prided himself on his speed as he lunged and darted from thought to thought as fast as the swift stoop upon prey, talons striking and piercing truth. He must have a glimpse of her in their fledgehood, in their nest; he must have known her ungainly and fuzzy and uncertain, he must have witnessed her first flight as she saw his.

There was nothing. There was only her as she was now, the icy depths of her cold eyes.

“You really remember nothing of me,” she said. “Nothing at all.”

“Not before our flight,” he said. 

She seemed disappointed for a moment, were she capable of such feeling.

“How did you get out of here?” he asked.

“That’s not the question you really want to ask, is it?” she said.

“It’s the one I am asking.” He tried to deepen his voice, to arch his back to seem less frightened. Few predators did his kind have, and he had little acquaintance with fear. He knew the snap of the teeth of the Warg before his talons severed its throat; he knew the hiss and stab of the arrows of Men; he knew the poisoned air of the nests of the Enemies as they wreak their violence upon the landscape, grown so much bolder and larger in area in the recent years. He had not known the fear of looking into the eyes of one so much like himself, and seeing an endless sensation of falling.

“You cannot see it, can you?” she said, shaking her proud head and seeming to laugh a little, clucking her sharp tongue within her beak. “You who pride yourself on seeing the most, of all our kind. You cannot tell when there is nothing to see.”

With a sense of deepening dread, he came forward to the edge of the bars. She leaned in. He gave a nervous cry, almost involuntary.

“Fascinating,” she said. “Was that a death call or a mating call? Such a piercing little squeak, but you nearly sang. Almost beautiful, it was, although we don’t make beautiful sounds, do we? Beauty has no meaning, does it - only if it’s correct. Was that the correct sound for you to make? Have you mated? I have. It was…messy. Feathers everywhere.”

His throat ran dry. He did not think that was how it was supposed to go.

“What have you missed, my brother? What is it that you do not see?” Her tone was mocking and yet still so deadly flat and cold. He shuddered to think of what might be capable of exciting her.

“Was it something I should have seen . . . When we flew together?” He was shamed by the tone of his voice, the hint of a plaintive screech in it. Clearly she wanted something from him, and was not yet willing to name it.

“You don’t know the truth about Redwing, do you?” she said.

“What does that have to do with anything?” he said. Something there was, blurry and indistinct on the edge of his hindsight.

“Come closer,” she said. Her vast wings fluttered once, twice, three times, stretched above her head and then back down again. She put her head down in an inviting gesture. She was huge. Her wings, briefly unfolded, stretched out to the sky in a performance of longing.

He did.

She lunged forward. Involuntarily his wings curled around himself protectively for just a moment - enough for her to see his fear.

She made a series of sharp sounds - mad laughter, he thought.

And then she stretched out a wing, and he reached out to mirror her, commanded by the gleam of her eyes. And then her wing touched his.

And then she was rising through the bars of stone and steel, and he realized that he should have seen all along they did not close, and she could breach them easily, and she did; in that moment she was upon him, shrieking and snapping with her cruel pointed beak. 

Her sudden violence was shocking. Her talons tangled his in a cruel parody of the mating grasp, for they were upon stone, not free in the air, and he was pinned beneath her, his wings scrabbling at the stone til he feared they would break and he could never ever fly again. Better that she kill him outright as she seemed wont to do, her sharp beak snapping through the feathers at his throat.

“Who will hear your screams?” she demanded. “The Men our brother set to watch upon me? They have long since fled or died, overrun by the horror of Mordor so nearby. Or at least that is what you will choose to believe, is it not? You who can choose to believe lies at will since you prefer them to the terrible truth. Is that what our brother has taught you? He has done you no kindness. They are gone because I sent them away, those I did not devour. How dare they presume to think they could keep me if I did not wish to be kept for mine own reasons? If I let you live, I will show you their bones. Long have I dwelt here with little to do but gnaw upon the dead. If any eagle came near, I would sing them down out of the sky and tear them to pieces.”

He closed his eyes and in the sight of his mind he saw dismembered eagles at the bottom of her pit, their bones and feathers mingled with the much smaller but heavier bones of men - beaks and skulls, screaming in silence and blind for-ever, tongues and eyes picked out by her terrible sharpness.

He could not tell what was real, and what were pictures that she placed in his mind, suggesting with her voice. If she continued to play on his mind like this, what could she make him do? Kill another? Kill himself, by simply pulling in his own wings at miles of height and letting himself drop like weight already dead?

What was this fell power she had - was this how she had freed herself and placed herself back in her prison again, tipping off no one that she was free to roam at will?

No matter - survival was what mattered now. Frantically did he scrabble on the stone floor, twisting his body around her larger bulk until he could slide. Her weight pressed his throat. He lay still for long moments as her cries became incoherent shrieks. At last he wriggled free and desperately reached for the clear air with his trembling pinions. Long had it been since he had known himself to be so fragile.

“Who will stop me killing you?” she said, almost sadly.

“Only you,” he said as he hopped backwards, first furling out his wings to look bigger and then curling them about himself, briefly, protectively.

“And if I do not wish to stop?” she said, pressing close upon him.

“Then I will die,” he said. “But I don’t think that is your true will.”

Awkwardly he hopped and turned until he felt open sky at his back. Into empty air he launched himself, a leap of faith. Faith he had, that his bruised wings would still fly, for all that she would still pursue him and catch him. For all the long years had taught him that there is a proper time to die, and one must meet it as it comes. Rivers and roads and beds of stone shift and change and lock about one’s feet if one stands still - he wished only to meet death in the air, where his kind belonged, to feel the embrace of the sky one last time before spiraling down to the crushing ground or drowning waterfall. Would he lie with the Men and Elves and Orcs in the Dead Marshes, he wondered - a vast shadow cast over them, until the world was remade.

Fair had she seemed when they had flown together once before - her eyes innocent and sad, her feathers bright and clean but fading, her gait and flight ungainly from long pain. Now he saw the truth of her as he shot for the heights and she pursued him - she was strong and in her prime, dark and wild, endlessly hungering - and yet, injured in truth. There was a pain in her that did not tell on the outside anymore, but that did not mean it wasn’t real.

Her wounded disguise, a self-portrait.

But he must not allow himself to forget that she was deadly.

Fast did she fly, and vast was her shadow upon the earth. All his kin must have been mad to think they could ever contain her if she did not wish to be contained - if she had a prison at all, it was of her own making, and she her only jailer.

Yet she was beautiful, as all their kind were with the wind beneath their wings. She seemed to sing as she soared, a beguiling and eerie tune, the air whipping through her great flight feathers. Her yellow talons tucked up against her body, she streaked up higher and higher, catching the rising spiral of warming wind from the desolate plains below. Eastward she drifted, and he hesitated to follow. The air of Mordor would be hot and it would rise swiftly, and it would be full of choking ash.

He recalled the older eagles’ tales of the terror in the North, Angband of old, and how the great slag peaks of Thangorodrim were the highest point in the land. Tales of how terrible could be the wrath of the Valar when roused, and of a land that sank beneath the waves forever. It was not enough for them to kill and torture their own people to achieve this result, no, it was when Men dared to sail their ships West to the land that was forbidden them. The Eagles, the Folk of the Wind, had circled above, bearing witness and bearing sad farewell to their seat at Meneltarma. There were no rescues from Westernesse-beneath-the-sea, not even the doomed queen Tar-Míriel who had crawled weeping to the summit, in a hope that was not rewarded.

“All those complicated little emotions,” said his sister, spiraling above him and clenching and unclenching her vast claws as if she longed to reach for him and break his bones and pluck out his eyes and scatter his feathers to the cold, smoky wind. “You love the drama, all the terror and the grief and the joy played out on a stage for you to watch and to swoop in when it suits you. You are tender-hearted, I deduced that. You adore the chance to rescue, even as you complain. You wish to be a hero. Like in the War of Wrath, a dragon-slayer. You probably think . . . You can rescue even me.”

He reasoned that she was correct, and that it was likely he would die trying. He would have liked a chance to see his erie again, his favorite spots in the Misty Mountains, his dear friend Iöc the talking raven of the Lonely Mountain, his kin - even his brother, yes. But a wish was not a wind when it was too far to soar.

Far and fast did he soar in his attempt to escape her, beating his great wings against the air. He felt the East Wind take control of him, blighted and smoking and stinging - but as his eyes burned he watched the land roll out beneath him, for at least the wind was blowing him ever farther away from Mordor.

He had fair lands to the West in his eyes when her shadow fell over him and he felt the wind of her vicious stoop, her wings pulled in tight against her body, steeply bending to one side. Feeling the soaring freedom of nothing left to lose, he accelerated too and rolled onto his back mid-air, exposing his belly, his talons stretched out in invitation.

She caught him by the claws and they spiraled together downward, their great wings open again and only barely slowing their rolling, intermingled fall.

This was a mating flight of sorts, he thought, perhaps for him a dance of death. The pointy crags of the Emyn Muil shot upwards too quickly, aiming to impale him, to break him. His whirling vision dizzied him, alternating the poison Dead Marshes and the wholesome prairies of Rohan.

He yielded. He surrendered.

And when she began to pull at him to draw him out of the death spiral, he resisted, he disengaged, and he dropped like a stone.

“No, no, no,” she cried, a keen of grief and horror that reverberated from the mountainsides enough to alarm the sentinels of Gondor and the watching Eye itself, to waken the beast of Cirith Ungol from her sated doze.

Nearly tenderly, she caught him just a few flaps from death, pulling him back up.

“I thought there was a chance you would not let me die, my sister,” he said, panting, trembling.

“You risked your life for a chance,” she said.

“I’ve done so before, with less of a chance than I saw in you now. Is that not what you saw in me before, when you came to me disguised? Had you wished me dead you could have slain me then. Or on many other occasions. When you set up your cruel games, some small part of you must have wished that I might win.”

“You would have died without knowing the truth about Redwing?”

“It was more important to me to know the truth about you.”

***

“Our folk do not keep pets, my brother. We are not meant to be friends with a smaller kindred. Did you really think we had a dumb, tiny bird to chase rabbits far beneath us? You had friends - you had others to soar with, to chase each other in the sky, to squabble over bones from the nest. I had no one. Do you not recall? You did not like to play with me. Even though I loved to make you laugh. Oh wait, was that laughter? Perhaps not.”

“Redwing,” he cried, a terrible keening sound. “You…you killed him!”

“I caught him,” she said. “By his wobbling unfinished wings in the big beech tree, you remember.”

“I searched for him!”

“And you must have known, when his feathers came down to earth, as light as snow. You ate well, little brother.”

“No, no, no,” he cried. 

Little known it is that Eagles can weep. It is rare, and the sound they make chills the blood and stops the hardest heart. But as he wept, he found himself pressing close to the puff of feathers in his sister’s crop, and he stared upon her eyes and found in them, beyond the madness, deep, deep wells of sorrow unending.

“When you fledged,” he said to her at last, “you soared far from the nest, farther than any of our kind had done at such a young age. Something happened to you. Something you saw, something invaded you, it must have done, you cannot have been hatched with such evil in your heart. Something shattered within you. Something has changed you, and it began to work upon you when you were very young. Something even our brother could not see, he the most brilliant of our kin other than you.”

“I am what I am, and I was like this from the egg. Yet I did roam, and I came back changed, my brother,” she said. “I am destroyed, there is no hope for me. I cannot land safely now, only fall.”

“You can! I am a fool but I can place my talons on the ground. I can perch in the great tree, I can roost upon the cliff where we build our nests. Listen to me. Lean in and I will tell you what this fool saw and felt when you attacked me.” He pressed his head close, trailing his beak down her neck to her breast, where he felt it, and carefully with the deadly sharp tip of his beak he parted her feathers. 

“Kill me if you dare,” she said. “Perhaps it is all I deserve. I had thought you too tender-hearted, but if you are able, I will be impressed by you at last.”

When he nuzzled her, he leaned in close, perceiving her with all his wit. In the sagging swells of her long-starved crop, he had perceived a thing that did not belong there. So long had it been since anyone had touched her there in tenderness, the barb had gone un-noticed for far, far too long. It grieved him to think how long it had pained and changed her.

“A wonder it is that you still live. That your heart still beats. That you are still mostly flesh in the land of the living. Long does this evil magic take to work its full effect on our kin. Feel this, this here - I cannot remove it yet, not just now, we shall seek help for this - the deadly arrowhead that lodges here so close to your heart. This is no mortal weapon, not the work of Men or Elves or even Orcs, no. This arrowhead is of Morgul-steel, and you are slowly becoming a wraith bending to the will of the Nine, my sister. The bearers of the Nine Rings of Sauron, who were once men and are no longer. But you are stronger than any Man. Long ages would it take you to fall completely into shadow, even as this blade burrows deeper within. But you have been maddened by pain for many long years, you have been tormented by visions, you have had cruel voices in your mind taking over your own at first, and then your own voice began to tune to theirs.

“But mighty you are, beyond the measure of any Man. Even the great sorcerer-kings of old, as all the Nine must have been, could never control you completely. You would be no mere steed like their animal-minded flying wyrms, no, a great scourge in your own right you would become, and you would answer only to their master, the Lord of all the Rings - if only he had the One. Because he does not, then you yet retain your fëa a little longer, in your un-wraithed body. There are no Rings made for our kind - yet had he thought of it, a great scourge upon the land we could become. 

“And my sister, I know you are not yet fully lost, for you could not bear to see me die. That outcome long desired, you thought, was a horror to you when you saw it coming close. Not only could you not slay me yourself when you had the chance, you could not bear to see me risk my own life, my own heart. There is good left in you yet, more than you know.”

“No,” she said, and her voice was a dry and bitter breath of winter. “No, I have never understood this thing called good or this thing called evil, or where the line is between them or which is which. There is correct and incorrect, and it seems you are trying to tell me that that does not matter either.”

“That is not what I am saying,” he said, and the gesture he made, of shaking his head side to side, was not a particularly Eaglish one. The desperately restrained motions of his wings were very much so. “I am saying that your sun has not set for good. Your winds have not stilled. You can learn to land and then rise again. Your sight has been veiled, but not taken from you. And I shall not give up on you.”

“Even if you know that I flew towards Mordor of my own free will? My brother, I have never understood the taboos that rule so many lives, of so many kindreds. Why should I not fly East if I wished? Why should I not speak with the Lord of the Tower if he would treat with me? I do not fear him. Why should I not have all the knowledge of every land, not only those I was told were safe and fair? Five moments only I wanted with him - five moments alone. And have I not paid dearly for it?”

“We have all paid dearly,” he said sadly. “No more, my sister. The East Wind is coming for us all, and you felt it first of all of us, upon you it blew the coldest. But there are other winds than these. You need not fly into the shadow forever.”

“You cannot free me from my doom, brother. You cannot bring me home. They will never have me now.

“Can I not? You have always been free in body if you did not feel it in spirit. Fly with me, in fellowship for once. Ask for the aid of the wise and perhaps your curse can be, if not lifted forever, then at least stilled and halted and made no worse. War beckons, and you may yet have a role to play before the end.”

“When has mercy ever turned a tide in war?” she snapped. “Are you feeling a premonition?”

“My heart tells me I am where I need to be,” he said. “In time with its cold blade removed, perhaps yours will feel free to speak. As it is, trust your wings.”

She did not speak again on that day. Not until the bounds of war broke at last and the great birds were called to battle in the skies above the Black Land did she speak. But from time to time until then, her brother would call for her, and together they would soar without words over mountain and meadow, over friend and foe alike, communicating in that way the Eagles do with the patterns of their flight and the gestures of talon and wing. Like music they played the whisper and whistle of the winds in their feathers - three winds foremost, and the East last of all, heeding its warnings without inhaling its dread.


End file.
